I'm sorry I haven't announced anything about judging, but the reasons are I haven't been able to recruit a minimum amount of judges (3). Currently it's me and Rebirth.

We need 1 more judge to reach the minimum. The last ditch attempt is to advertise here for someone clever who might be interested, but it's some work considering there's just over a week until it has to be finished (but well possible).

I'll give it until tomorrow, and in case we're unable to fill the panel I'll call off the judging panel part and let community voting be the only voting... which may well be the future anyway.

Good thing is, I planned for this eventuality by adding community voting feedback, so those who submitted 4k games will probably get more feedback compared to previous contests.

We need 1 more judge to reach the minimum. The last ditch attempt is to advertise here for someone clever who might be interested, but it's some work considering there's just over a week until it has to be finished (but well possible).

maybe you could extend by 1 week the voting deadline so the new judge (and even community) might have a little more time. I don't think there's a reason for someone to whine about that.

Thats 68 games. How long would a judge usually take to rate one game and by what aspects.

I mean there so much to consider... for example if a game looks really good or is 3D... thats great for 4k, crazy. But does that make a good game alone ? well noshould I even give plus points for a technological feat ? since a review should just be a player

you see where I am going

also the fact that - I looked at some earlier years ratings and I sometimes didn't agree with other judges at all

I'm happy you were able to find a full judging panel. Personally, I find the judges' results far more interesting - primarily because comments interest me more than scoring, but also because the kind of community vote we're using (with a points pool per user) favor people who advertise their games (as it's based on a total score rather than an average - correct?). I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but I personally prefer scorings where the number of voters matters less.

There is "Classic Game Room" on Youtube, and they do exactly that, ever since they started with online video reviews of video games in 1999 believe it or not.They also make fun of the whole thing sometimes by giving out ratings such as "7 out of green" for fun

I think an ordered relative bucket rating is better than an absolute score.

What do I mean by "ordered relative bucket rating"?

Let's say instead of assigning a score from 0-100 to a game, all you do is decide into which bucket it goes. "Superb" bucket, or "Good", "Fair", "Mediocre", "Poor".

Next step is sorting the games in each bucket in order of how good it is. So, if game C is better than game A, but game B is better than C, then the order would be B, C, A.

This would give "winners" for each bucket, but no score. I think this is a better assessment of the game than what we currently do.

The problem with rating games like this is it requires judges to agree, and to have a dialogue on each game (possible using voice chat), deciding on which bucket a game goes into, and then sorting inside each bucket.

Being realistic, I don't think that approach will work too well. It's going to be a nightmare to coordinate and very time-consuming. Disagreement deadlocks might happen.The good thing with the current judging process is it allows us to do it when we like, where we like it, how long we like it etc. And disagreements don't exist.

But this is a discussion we have every year, don't we? In the end, everybody are content with the end results.

Just to be clear, I was in no way trying to complain about either of our two scoring methods - I think they're both fine. I'm just saying I'm personally glad you managed to find judges, since these results are the ones that interest me the most.

The developers on this forum spend hours to days on their entries, sometimes pouring their hearts into their efforts. For every negative point that appears in your review, try to come up with something positive to balance it out.

That would be awesome actually, it'll give Java4K some needed Youtube coverage. Nonetheless, I wish all the judges this year luck on rating all 68 of these games. I wouldn't mind if the time for judging gets extended a bit, writing that many reviews can take a lot out of someone...

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